


Everything Is Broken Up, and Dances

by VastDerp



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gen, Pre-Scratch Alternia, snarky philosophical assgrabbing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-06
Updated: 2012-07-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 07:06:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/452689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VastDerp/pseuds/VastDerp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short pieces about the Sufferer and his family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It's the Festival of Dusk, and the ring of celebrants kicks up into a whirling kaleidoscope of fabric at the first crash of the opening drums.

The participants stomp and leap, flashing their skirts of every color, a ring of hands clasped slippery with sweat, bare feet flattening the earth in an orbit that grows more and more erratic until it's too much and they all fall tangled together to the sawdust in dizzy celebration, a chaos of damp hair and soft lips and eyes half-lidded in the mad pleasure of breathlessness.

They help each other to stand, and their touches linger. Strangers kiss. This is a night where skin must touch skin, to keep the dark at bay. They have performed the wheel of the sunset twice now, and all around them a clamor of voices and hands already shock the air crying and clapping for another, another.

Meanwhile, the blueblooded lord, your Festival host, hammers the table where the drinkers have gathered and calls for more wine, more wine. 

This is your first Festival as an adult, and you're afraid to join. Leijon grows tired of hearing you protest that you hate dancing, you don't know how, and shoves you a little too hard. You stumble into the ring and you're certain you'll fall, except you don't. Instead you're caught up and wrapped in the iron embrace of a man brought close to you by the last spin of the wheel.

He's enormous and homely and his horns are filed to stubs. His hands are vast coarse square things, more like paws than hands, and his palms are scarred grimy gray-green and shiny from sweeps of working with knives and heat and iron. 

His gaze is intense and curious as he sets you safely on your feet. He takes too long looking down into your face before he squeezes your own, softer hands, and he tells you he's never seen anyone with eyes so vividly red. You blush to match.

And then you dance.

\---

An eternity later, in a different life, you've never danced with a stranger, but you remember how it felt. How it felt to be kissed by a stranger whose mouth was electric with the taste of Dim season wine, bitter and moody and wild on the last night of the year. How it felt to lie cool and bare on the grass after the revelry, the sea of stars above you blocked out by the silhouette of his head and shoulders.

It never ended. The Festival of the Dusk, which never happened, and a man you never kissed. They go on and on, live forever in you. Their stories pull you down like a planet buried deep inside your head. Everything you are is pulled tight against that gravity.

You think that, in that life where you spun beneath a quartered pink moon, you must have been very happy. You still dance in this life, through sewer tunnels and whispering alleys, away from the glares of the unmoved masses to hidden rooms and secret places where you will tell your stories over and over again.

It's a dance wheel, an orbit.

It sends you onward through the steps, whirling through all the colors of blood around a center point you don't understand.


	2. When the True King's Murderers Are Allowed to Roam Free, a Thousand Magicians Arise in the Land.

You are a lion, a creature of the present tense. 

Fire, and it's now. Blood, and it's now. Rage, right now. A scream drowning itself cold in your throat to soothe the burn of smoke. 

He is, he is. Where is he? What is the thing that he is? He is nothing.

You have a rudimentary grasp of 'past' and 'future', but they come hard for you in the best of times, and you are in a panic. "Was" eludes you. "Did" completely unravels you.

You flee what you suspect will turn out to be a terrible understanding of chronology--a word you do know, warily.

The streets are in chaos.

You're elbowing and clawing your way through a hissing crowd of baffled midbloods. They're here to see a great man and his fiercest warrior die, but you're running away. You have a blank space of soot-smeared gray throat where there should be the shaft of an arrow. You don't know why you aren't dead. You clutch the bundle of rags to your chest and feel the coarse fabric press dampness into your unbroken skin. Maybe sweat, maybe blood. Maybe his, maybe yours. 

The green moon is low, almost touching the tops of the buildings. It will be dawn soon, and you are still alive.

A juvenile greenblood, precisely your shade, hops sideways out of your way. His eyes, still gray, peek out from under his tangled fringe. You see him for a moment, but once you're past you hear him cry "That's the Disciple!" More trolls push out of your way, afraid to touch you, scared whatever you have is catching. Two larger low blues, a man and a woman, shove into your path and try to block you. You take one under the chin with your fist and ram your horns into the gut of the other. He's down and gasping and she's out cold before you break your way through the wall of staring faces and find yoursel with some space around you. You're nearing the outskirts, now, almost past the guards.

Disciple. That's what they call you.

You think about when Captor hears the listeners point you out as "Disciple" and rolls his weird eyes and gets annoyed. 

* * *

"Yeah, what a great name, let's make it all about the man she follows instead of who she is." 

You roll your eyes right back at Captor and stick out your tongue.

"How about 'Huntress'? I like 'Huntress'. Or, shit, you've made us all dinner before, why not? Leijon, your title's officially 'The Disaster'."

You all laugh, even though Captor's the one who isn't allowed to cook with his powers anymore because of the tent being so flammable. Captor's a funny guy, when he isn't shutting up for days. 

'Huntress' is pretty good, though, you have to admit.

"I like 'Disciple'," you tell him, "it's a good name." 

"But why let other people define you?"

Vantas says "It's just a name." 

Captor waves this off and says "Don't be a moron. Much as I adore this idealistic love and peace land you go off to where everyone's inherently fucking equal by virtue of squirming out of the caves in one more or less intact piece, the rest of us have to live and die by how we're treated by the system, which goes right down to who we are being supplanted by how we're perceived. Your self-respect matters if you actually want to win." 

"Win? Come on," says Vantas. "Identity isn't meant to be a battle."

"No, it's an all-out war. Your selfhood versus your assigned place in the world. Take what little individuality you can away from the unsponged masses or they'll relegate you to a bad joke and shit on your memory."

"That's incredibly pessimistic."

"That's incredibly Alternia, idiot. Anyway, I have a better one. 'The Survivor'. That's much better than someone else putting a name on you that's not even who you are."

"You're doing the same exact thing," Vantas points out. "Let her alone. If she likes it, what's the problem?"

"The problem is there's already a 'Signless'. Obviously the rest of us are ALL your fucking disciples. I don't go around calling myself 'the Bodyguard', do I?"

"Because 'Weeonic' is so much closer to who you are as a troll."

"I keep telling you, that's not how you say--"

"Look, I understand what you're getting at, and I see your point. But at the end of the night, Leijon chooses to acknowledge what they call her, and it's her choice. If she wants to be my Disciple, fine! Even though I think it's kind of weird that people are making me the center of this, which I never intended, by the way--"

"See? You're perceived as the center, but you don't want to be. It's the same exact fucking thing!"

"I choose to dislike it, for myself. That's the difference."

"Convenient."

"Look, Captor, a troll can be whoever they want.Your personal opinion on whether or not it's good enough is not required."

"It's not my 'personal' anything, you nookhole, it's a revolutionary act! Claiming your own identity against the stacked deck of society. Otherwise you're playing to people's expectations in your basic identity! Why sacrifice something so personally significant--"

"Who cares?" Vantas shouts. "She's not complaining!"

"It's the principle of the thing--"

"The principle of your nook having a stick up it, you mean? Do go on."

"Yeah, that's incredibly philosophical and mature, I am utterly persuaded."

"What, do you think you know what's right for other people now?"

"I never fucking said that! Stop putting words in my breezecave!"

"Then stop being everybody's advocate. Like you're so righteous."

"Oh, what the fuck ever, I"m done arguing with you."

* * *

Sometimes they forget you're there. But that's okay, you're not a big talker. What you do is, you watch. You pay attention. That's why you like Disciple, it says "She's the one who listens best."

You have ragged hair that clumps into locks when someone doesn't brush it for you. Your horns are chipped. You have claws constantly crusted with things that make Maryam howl with dismay. That's who you are. A follower with no purpose of her own, and that's fine. You like it that way.

And you are a huntress, yes. You're a survivor, too, your jutting ribs all covered by flesh now, your hair clean and the bones mostly combed out, your terrible scrapes and gashes from a nearly fatal fall finally healed up, surrounded by warm hands and caring words. And you realize, there are mouths to feed. 

This is something you can do to pay it all back. 

It's not like how Maryam helps, with her patience and gentle words, not like the Signless and his need to nurture the soul and his almost ashamed hands skating along your bare shoulders sometimes when it's late and you're alone together, nervous, like he's not good enough to have you even though his head is full of beauty like a raging fire. Not even like Captor with every soft thought in his pan deep-buried under layers of regret and fear and anger that smells like burning wires. It's something you can do.

So when they say 'Disciple', they don't know what it means, not really. To you, it means hungry nights wrapped in arms, feeding each other comfort. It means hearing things that you don't understand but that stab you in your chest like you already knew them, like it's the way things should be. It means allies. It means no more hiding in holes in the rock and being so small and scared that maybe nothing matters.

There's a word for what you do. Captor would know. You provide. You assist. The cave cats teach great skills to a lost and lonely girl hiding in the bushes, if she watches close enough. If she's quiet. If she pays attention, she survives, she hunts, and she protects. She helps the story go on. That's what you do.

And what you do is what you want to be, forever.

You're not given to great ideas of how the world is, but you feel this thing like a fire on the plain. Captor is the edge of the grassfire. He burns ahead into the future at unpredictable speeds and with endless energy, going here, going there, burning this tree to the ground and leaving that one scorched but standing. The Signless is the coals that stay behind, fallen woods smoldering hidden in the ashes, lighting a path backward into the past, which is a kind of thinking you don't do much of. You're the Now, and the Now is smoke, blowing sometimes forward and sometimes back, but not part of those things. You're not sure what the wind is. Probably the Signless might tell you, if you ask.

But the smoke is acrid with burned flesh and hair. In the wild, things die all around you. Everything is food for something else. But your small group of dreamers, you believe that ideas live forever.

How can that be true, now that you're a Disciple of nobody and nothing? What do you do when the now runs out?

"She spent a long time living out there," Maryam says. No, said, she said it, an it was a long time ago. She is--was--sewing up your arm at the time. You clutched your knees and imagined biting the pain dead until it was easier to let her hurt you more. "Most of it, I suspect, was alone."

Your days of valuing time begins there, at that point in time, with meeting your friends in the desert. It's shaky, but you start there.

"She clearly picked up some language at some point, but try not to make any sudden moves for the time being, and be patient."

It comes to you that this was before Captor, before Vantas became Signless, before you learned to touch. This is, then, the past tense.

You met them, you lived with them, you became the Disciple with them. You were captured with them.

There. There it is. The end of the past tense and the start of now.

Two words.

He died.

They're heavy, and they hurt. You can't reach in and take him away from it, because it's not still going on. You saw it happen. You can't go back and make it different.

You don't know what to do with the weight of things that you have found, things that you have allowed to matter, going away. How does he manage it with a whole world?

And no, oh no, now the dream is gone too. He took it with him, he left his words and burned away.

Captor is gone, Maryam is gone. You can't get them back. 

Gone. Over. Past.

You could only run.

You took his clothes when he died, when they cut him down, when they burned him. They pulled him naked to shame him and, and you ran when the arrow pointed at you went wild and you saw a chance. Took, past tense, the pile of clothing that was all you could take with you. Scrambled. Rolled. Shredded faces with your claws until you tore a hole through the screamers and broke loose.

That was the end of then-ness, and the start of the now that is your natural state.

It would be easy to sink back into that way of thinking. Live each day as a cave cat, valuing nothing, aching for words that you don't have. Painful, hard, sad. But easier.

No.

You are running because you will escape back into the wilderness. Will escape, future tense. You will. You have to.

You kick aside a guard, swipe a sickle from his belt, behead two other guards and tear the throat out of a troll who was probably not trying to stop you. You allow the survivor, the huntress, to protect the Disciple. You run. The streets empty and dwindle and you scale the wall with your clever toes and you run, you run, you run away into the scrub and the bushes, and no one chases you. You were only a follower, what can you do?

You can find the cave where you survived before. You can live. 

And you do. Your cave is just as you left it, and before you collapse you tuck the stolen clothes into a secret space you once found inside a strangely hollow rock lined with a crust of glittering purple crystals. You'll keep them safe forever.

There's some kind of value in your desire to reach back into the past and take things away from it, to protect them. Obviously you can't take your friends back, but you can carry the things they said. You don't know how to do it, and before you can think straight you have to scream and kick and claw the hurt away until you've cried yourself dry and slept away the panic.

You wake in the dusk, calm, your head full of a plan that you must have dreamed, although you don't remember if you did. You remember all the times you paid such close attention to what was being said, when you were first becoming the Disciple.

Words come to you. There was a world...

Wait. You can't do this just thinking. He spoke his story, but no one here will listen to you. It won't live on if you tell the cave cats. This has to stay real when you die, the way his stories stayed real inside of you. It has to go forward.

You kick around in the dust of the cave until you find the pit where you lit your fires in winter. In the ashes lies a small shard of charred wood that catches your eye and makes your bloodpusher jump. You take it.

The cave wall stares down at you, discolored in places by loopy juvenile smears of brown faded blood and black berry-juice, your earliest attempts to create art when you were all alone in here and half-mad with the need to communicate. It seems fitting to start here.

What is an abattoir? 

You don't know. But you know your letters. Captor showed you long ago before he went away. He said the funniest things when you had trouble getting it right, but in the end he admitted that you were actually sort of a good student, and you hugged him, and he got all quiet and had to leave the tent.

Now to remember what the man who saw the future taught you, so you can speak for the one who saw the past.

You spell it all out very carefully, scraping lines onto the wall with your bit of charcoal, writing slow to make everything the way the Signless said it. The work takes less time than it should, such grand thoughts turning into flat lines on rock. When it's all written out, though, you feel something you've never felt before. A sort of spark inside, saying "Yes. Yes. Yes." 

This is where it all makes sense. Not to blow in the wind, but to ride it. Not to watch, but to tell. Not to be the Disciple of the man, but to carry his burden for him. The listener now telling, the watcher now showing, purpose finally understood. Not a follower, but a guide. 

You are a lion, and a creature of the present tense. You will write the bridge between the past and the future.

You examine your work, and it looks right. Clumsy, crooked and wobbly, but right. 

You read it out loud, the first of thousands:

"There was a world," You begin, "Where a rainbow was a miracle, and not an abattoir."

It sounds just like him.

\---

The Disciple raises her bit of charcoal, and begins.


End file.
